Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 4.djvu/157

 and historian. The "southern" and the "lake" schools now lost their influence among officials, and the metropolitan school under Hayashi, adhering strictly to the philosophy of Chu, alone remained to dispute the field with the eclectic under Kinoshta. Tsunayoshi, the fifth Tokugawa Shōgun (1680–1709), who, before he abandoned himself to debauchery, showed all the instincts of scholarship, encouraged erudition, and went so far as to deliver lectures on the Chinese classics in the hall of the university over which the Hayashi family presided. Thus a fashion was at once set, and, many of the feudal chiefs following it, several schools were established throughout the provinces. That their teachings should in a measure reflect the rivalries of the fiefs was inevitable. To that cause probably as much as to honest conviction is to be attributed the birth of other schools with which are associated the names of men famous in their day and even now well remembered; Yamada Sōkō, master of several eminent disciples; Kaibara Yekken, compiler of celebrated text-books for women and children; Ito Jinsai, who popularised the Analects in Kyōtō; Ogyū Sōrai, who followed the same line in Yedo; and not a few others. Speaking broadly, these various teachers undertook to give correct interpretations of Confucius and Mencius, and to prove that the exigeses of Chu and Wang were erroneous. Ogyu [sic] Sōrai, whose school in Yedo was largely attended, went so far